


If It's Wrong Or If It's Right

by Antonia



Category: Drip (TV show)
Genre: Coffee Shops, M/M, Prostitution, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 20:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17731700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antonia/pseuds/Antonia
Summary: Mark is on his way home from a late shift when he sees Lucas working the streets.





	1. Chapter 1

It’s eleven-thirty at night and Mark is coming off an eight-hour shift, exhausted and cranky and stinking of espresso. He’s learning a lot from this stupid job, all right, but not the lessons his parents wanted him to learn from it, if the way they treat service staff is any indication of what they know about hard work. Mark’s parents are the kind of customers that baristas whisper furiously to each other about after they leave, and it feels like that’s the only kind of customer he’s gotten today.

He’s beginning to suspect that they never intended him to learn anything at all. They just wanted him to suffer. Well, he’ll show them. He’s building all _kinds_ of good character over here.

It’s dark as he passes the lake, but further up Aurora there are plenty of street lamps casting dull light over the smorgasbord of scantily clad bodies along the side of the road. As his eyes skim over them, one catches his eye. It’s a boy, thin and dark-skinned, wearing a tight tank top and a black collar with silver spikes sticking out of it. He’s bent down, leaning his hands on the window sill of a car as he talks to the driver, but he’s tall enough that Mark can still see most of his face. He almost looks like…

Mark passes him, and squints into the rearview mirror. The guy looks a _lot_ like Lucas.

It can’t be him, obviously, but some strange urge compels Mark to take the next right and loop back around to double-check. The layout of the streets is all weird, and he doesn’t know this part of town very well--obviously, given the hookers draped all over it--so it takes him a while to find the road again.

When he finally passes that stretch of sidewalk for the second time, the guy who looked like Lucas is gone. Of course. He was talking to someone in a car, he must be off giving the dude a rusty trombone or whatever it is people hire hookers to do. Mark wouldn’t know. _He’s_ never had to pay for it.

He drives the rest of the way home, trying not to think about it. There’s no way it could have actually been Lucas selling ass on the street. Lucas has a job, Mark just saw him doing it this afternoon. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be out jerking off strangers in the middle of the night. And this guy wasn’t wearing glasses, which Lucas is blind as an earthworm without.

Despite everything he tells himself, he can’t shake the mental image of the guy leaning his hands on the windowsill of the car, spiky collar glinting in the light of the dirty street lamp, hips cocked to one side, maybe trying to give the guy in the car a glimpse of the profile of his ass. Mark’s seen Lucas stand a little bit like that behind the counter when he’s flirting with customers; not nearly so pronounced, but the same general angle.

It doesn’t matter. It’s not him.

***

Lucas is at work the next morning, looking perfectly normal, and Mark eventually manages to forget about the doppelganger. He does pay a little more attention to the people lining the streets on his way home whenever he works late for the next few weeks, but he doesn’t see the guy again. He’s relieved, but also disappointed. It would have been nice to make absolutely sure.

Then one day Lucas shows up to work wearing his usual skinny jeans, band shirt, Converse, stud earrings… and a black leather collar with metal spikes.

It could be a coincidence. A lot of people own spiked collars. Mark knows that. He’s been to way more than his fair share of parties teeming with grunge kids and goth wannabes. That crowd always had better drugs than the frat parties, although the booze was never anywhere near as good. Mark used to stop by the frats for liquor, then check out the seedy raves to snort or swallow something, then head back to Greek Row for the girls. They were a lot cleaner there. But he spent enough time at the underground parties to know that there are a lot of spiked collars out there in the world.

He’s not going to say anything. It’s hard not to, but he manages. Until Lucas is talking to a cute girl at the register and he does that thing, leaning on the counter with his hands and cocking his hips, and Mark has some serious deja vu.

The next time Lucas goes into the back room, Mark follows him. Lucas has the supply cabinet open, fishing out another package of napkins, when he realizes Mark is there. Lucas looks back at him, eyebrows raised, since there’s always supposed to be one of them out manning the counter.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Mark asks, and then bites his tongue. He didn’t mean to do this now, when there’s no time to really talk about it. He should have waited until later, maybe timed his break with Lucas getting off work and caught him outside. But it’s too late now.

“What?” Lucas takes the package of napkins out of the cabinet and closes the door.

Mark points to the collar. “You were wearing that. On Aurora, a few weeks ago. I saw you getting into someone’s car.”

Lucas’s face shuts down completely. Usually, he looks either vaguely amused or vaguely bored, but there’s nothing vague about his expression right now. It says _fuck off,_ loud and clear. He pushes past Mark, out of the back room and into the shop, leaving Mark staring after him.

Sarah Jane’s voice comes from the shop, saying, “Hey, nice collar. Arf, arf! I should put a leash on you, maybe then you wouldn’t leave the damn register alone.”

A moment later, she comes into the back room, frowning behind her. “What’s up with Lucas?” she asks Mark. “He just looked at me like I put him on opening shift for a whole week or something.”

Mark shrugs, unable to trust himself to sound normal, and heads back out to the counter. There’s a line now, fortunately, so he doesn’t have to stand next to Lucas in awkward silence. Lucas stays at the register, scribbling orders on cups with a Sharpie instead of just telling Mark what to make like he usually does.

Well, one thing is pretty clear: Mark wasn’t wrong. For some reason, Lucas sells ass on the street. Or has at least once, although it would be a hell of a coincidence if he’d only done it once and Mark had happened to catch him at it. It’s way more likely that he does it regularly. But why? He has a job. Sarah Jane hasn’t cut hours lately, as far as Mark knows. He shouldn’t need to suck strangers’ dicks for money.

Lucas won’t talk to him for the rest of the shift, which lasts another three hours. Mark’s never realized how much they usually chat behind the counter. He always catches Lucas up on sports news, and Lucas tells him what’s going on in the local music scene, and they both make fun of each other for their respective obsessions, but they do pay attention most of the time. Mark has learned more about indie music since he started working at Drip than he’s known in the entire rest of his life. And they talk about difficult customers, and whine about how many early shifts they’ve been given, and tell stories about the latest assholes Amanda’s terrorized for hitting on her.

Today, the time takes forever to pass. There’s nothing to do in between customers except wonder about Lucas the secret prostitute. When some street kid comes in with a beat-up guitar and a giant sheepdog and starts strumming off-key in the corner with the dog curled up at her feet, Mark doesn’t even ask her to knock it off until the other customers start complaining, and he lets the dog stay inside even though it’s against the health code. Lucas acts like he doesn’t see her, too, but he always acts like that. He seems to have a soft spot for the street kids.

Mark’s starting to suspect he has reasons for that.

Lucas leaves the second his shift is over, passing in front of Mark, and Mark notices that he’s taken the collar off. He wants to ask, wants to talk about it, but they’re in the middle of the shop and even if they weren’t Lucas wouldn’t talk to him. He’s made that pretty clear. He watches Lucas go, trying to figure out how to get through to him. Shit, he’s no good at this stuff.

Thirty seconds later, Lucas strides back in. He comes right up to the counter, leans over it, and says in a low voice, lips brushing right up against Mark’s ear, “Don’t tell anybody. Please.”

He leaves again without waiting for a response. Mark’s ear tingles for a long, long time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucas isn't eating enough.

Mark's not planning on telling anybody. Who would he tell? Sarah Jane? “Hey, one of your employees is moonlighting as a hooker! They teach you about hookers in sophomore sex ed, right?” Sure, that would go over well. It wouldn’t even accomplish anything besides embarrassing the hell out of Lucas, as long as he’s not letting it affect his job performance at Drip.

No, Mark has no interest in spreading the information. He just wants to _understand_ it.

He starts driving around the rough parts of town at night, looking for Lucas. He’s not sure what he’d do if he found him--Lucas would probably just refuse to speak to him, like he’s doing at work. Sarah Jane has noticed, and asked if there’s something going on. Mark told her that Lucas was mad at him and he didn’t know why. He does know, but he’s not about to explain it to her, and this way she’ll bother Lucas about it instead of him.

It takes him a week of cruising every night before he finds Lucas again. Mark almost misses him--he’s hanging back in the shadows this time, not lit up by a lamp. The reason for this becomes clear as soon as Mark parks and gets out: Lucas doesn’t look at all surprised to see him. He must have seen Mark’s car coming, recognized it, and tried to hide.

“Fuck off,” he says. He doesn’t really need to say the words; his expression is saying them for him again. Mark never realized how good-natured he usually was before he started glaring all the time. 

He misses how friendly Lucas used to be. They bickered a lot, but they had fun. Now everything just feels tense.

“Just tell me why,” Mark says. He takes a step toward Lucas, and Lucas takes one back. “Is it for kicks or something, or do you actually need the money?”

Lucas stares at him. He looks strange without his glasses on. He looks really good, actually. “Are you shitting me?”

“I don’t get it.” Mark doesn’t try to get closer, because clearly that’s not going to work. “You have a job. Why would you do this?”

The angry expression has been entirely replaced by an incredulous one. “How the hell much is Sarah Jane paying _you?_ ”

“Uh.” Mark doesn’t actually have any idea. He’s not working at Drip for the money, he’s doing it for the life experience, according to Mom. His paycheck goes straight into a bank account that he never really looks at. He’ll probably invest it when the balance gets high enough to bother, but he hasn’t checked it lately.

“Listen, rich boy,” Lucas says, and whoa, he _really_ sounds mad now. “I get nine-fifty an hour making lattes. Twenty hours a week tops, most weeks more like fifteen. You take out taxes, that’s less than five hundred a month. You know what rent is like around here? You know how much it costs to eat? You know what an electricity bill looks like? A bus pass?”

Mark does not know any of those things. Well, he knows how much it costs to eat at restaurants because he has to calculate the tip, but that’s probably not what Lucas is talking about.

Lucas snorts and looks away. “I said fuck off.”

“But I have money,” says Mark. He still doesn’t get it. “You don’t have to be out here sucking cock. I could help out until you can find some other way to earn a living.”

“Yeah, you know what, I’ll take the cock,” says Lucas. A car approaches slowly, and he steps out toward it. “Speaking of which, I’m gonna say this one more time: fuck off.”

Mark has never seen Lucas like this before, all snide and nasty. He’s got a sharp sense of humor sometimes, but he’s never sounded like he really means it. He’s surprised by how much it hurts. He didn’t think he cared that much about Lucas’s opinion of him. Apparently he was wrong.

The car rolls to a stop in front of them, and Lucas saunters toward it, already acting like Mark isn’t there. He leans on the passenger-side window sill with his forearms, head practically inside the car as he talks to the driver. Mark takes a step to the side to get a look at the guy. He’s middle-aged and really, really not attractive.

Mark should get back in his car and go, right now. He should leave Lucas to have sex with this guy who’s old enough to be his dad. No, he shouldn’t. Jesus, this is so fucked up. “Lucas,” he says. Lucas ignores him, and he calls more loudly, “Lucas! Come on, don’t! We’ll figure something out, okay?”

The car takes off so fast that it hits Lucas’s head before he can pull back out of the window. Lucas curses and turns on Mark, furious. “What the hell! That was going to be seventy-five dollars, you fucking asshole!” He rubs his head and looks at his fingers, like he’s checking for blood.

Mark grabs for his wallet and pulls out four twenties. “Here.” Lucas doesn’t move, and Mark shakes the bills impatiently. “Come on, don’t tell me you’d rather get fucked by that guy than just take money from me.”

“Yeah, that's exactly what I’m telling you,” Lucas snaps. “Fine. You know what, fine. If you won’t fuck off, I will. Thanks for ruining my night.” He takes off down the sidewalk, away from the main road.

Mark gets back in his car and just sits there, frustrated. It’s a long time before he gets it together enough to drive home, and much longer before he manages to fall asleep.

***

Mark has the early shift the next morning, and he’s pretty much a zombie. He spent the night thinking instead of sleeping, and has come to the conclusion that even though he thinks Lucas is crazy for turning down free money, scaring off the guy was a dick move on his part and calls for an apology. That conclusion took a lot of hard work and emotional sacrifice, so it's definitely not fair that on top of all that he now has to actually apologize.

Lucas has the midshift, starting at ten-thirty. They’re busy with the late-morning rush for a while, but things calm down after noon. By one, the only customers in the place are a homeless guy who’s been adding hot water to his teabag all day and a couple college students with their noses in laptops, half-drunk macchiatos forgotten beside them. None of them are near the counter, so they can’t hear when Mark says softly to Lucas, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

Mark almost asks if he’s kidding, but then he sees the look on Lucas’s face. He’s not playing dumb or trying to pretend everything’s okay. He just wants to know what part of the whole mess Mark thinks is worth apologizing for.

Mark figures he’d better cover his bases. “Ruining your night. I know you want me to stay out of your business, and that’s fair. I’m just worried about you, man.”

Lucas sighs. “Yeah, I know. I got it under control, okay?”

And he did seem in control, both of the times Mark has seen him out on the streets… but he can’t help thinking about what happens later, after Lucas gets into the cars. There’s no way his customers let him stay in control. Mark doesn’t want to think about how they take that control away from him. It’s dangerous.

“You feel safe out there?” Mark asks. He means it to sound sarcastic, rhetorical, but it comes out all wrong. He bites down on his tongue.

Lucas doesn’t answer for a long time, long enough that Mark thinks maybe he’s not going to, but then finally: “You don’t get this.”

Mark can’t figure out if that’s supposed to mean that he doesn’t understand it, or that it’s something he’s not allowed to have. Either way, he knows that the right thing to do is to shut up and leave it alone.

Leaving it alone lasts maybe two hours. Mark's not great at doing the right thing.

Lucas is talking to Mark again--he’s not quite back to his normal level of cheerfulness, but it’s a big step up from the silent treatment, and the afternoon passes much more pleasantly than most of the shifts they’ve shared lately. People start wandering in for the evening, and Lucas tells Mark their orders out loud, and it all feels much more normal.

Then a girl turns away from the counter, balancing her coffee and banana bread and wallet and phone, and bumps into the guy in line behind her. She manages to save the coffee, but the banana bread hits the deck. Mark gives her a new slice for free, because Sarah Jane is big on building customer goodwill. While he’s getting it out of the display case, Lucas comes out from behind the counter to pick up the dropped slice.

Instead of throwing it away in the trash under the counter, he disappears into the back room. Curious, Mark peers through the little window in the swinging door, and catches a glimpse of him _eating it._

And that right there is the end of leaving it alone. Mark pushes through the doors and says, “Dude.”

Lucas tosses the rest of the slice in the garbage guiltily. “Thirty-second rule?”

“ _Dude,_ ” says Mark. “If you’re hungry enough to eat food off the fucking ground, you do not _have this under control._ ”

Lucas rolls his eyes. “There was nothing wrong with it. It landed mostly on the napkin. I’m not starving, I just don’t like waste.”

Mark hasn’t really looked closely at Lucas’s face in a while, given that Lucas has been avoiding eye contact for weeks. Now, in the harsh fluorescent light of the back room, he can see how much more defined Lucas’s jaw looks. He’s not eating enough.

Mark’s not prepared to see that. He gets it, in the abstract, that Lucas is doing desperate things because he’s desperate, because he actually needs the money for basic living expenses, but seeing the sharp angle of his face makes it real. More real than watching him leaning into a stranger’s car. Mark knows what it’s like to miss a meal, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to be hungry.

And Lucas is lying about it. Now that he’s gotten used to Mark knowing his secret, he’s turning everything into dry humor again. It makes Mark feel a little sick, wondering how long Lucas has been covering up his problems with sarcasm and smiles.

“If you won’t take money, will you take food?” Mark asks. “Can I buy you a _clean_ piece of banana bread? Or, like, order you a pizza?”

Lucas shakes his head. “Bro,” he says, which is weird, because he likes to make fun of Mark for saying “bro” too much, but he sounds serious. “I’m not taking shit from you. I take what I’ve earned. That’s it.”

Sarah Jane’s voice comes from the front. “I swear to god I will fire both of you. One person at the register all the time, that’s every second of every shift. What are the two of you even doing back there?”

Mark ignores her. “So if I offer you help because I’m your friend and I care about you, you won’t accept it, but if I come up to you on the street and throatfuck you, then you will?”

“Yeah. That’s how it works.” Lucas pats him on the shoulder and heads back out to the shop. Mark stares after him, helplessly angry. What the hell is he supposed to do now?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucas is talking to Mark again. Mark tries not to screw it up.

The next week, Lucas comes to work with a split lip. Amanda, who’s getting off shift at the same time, says, “Whoa there, tiger, who beat you up? Are you getting in street fights now?”

“Yeah, I got recruited by a gang of music nerds.” Lucas makes a hilariously sad attempt at a gang sign. “We wear ironic bandanas and skinny jeans with the waists down low. Nah, I got a fist to the face in the pit at the Crocodile last night. No big.”

Amanda glances dubiously at his lip. “If you say so,” she says, and takes off. Lucas sometimes hangs around after the end of his shift if he’s in the middle of a conversation or wants to hear the rest of the album that’s playing, but Amanda never does.

The split lip didn’t come from a mosh pit, Mark knows, but he’s pretty sure asking about it won’t do any good, so he just says quietly, “You okay?”

Lucas shoots him a warning look. “Fine,” he says, too loud, and Mark doesn’t push it.

Sarah Jane comes out from the office and whistles at Lucas’s face. “I should see the other guy, right?”

“ _Oh_ yeah,” Lucas says. He holds up a skinny arm and flexes. It doesn’t look much different from his non-flexed arm. Sarah Jane cracks up and starts comparing her arm muscles to his.

Most of the guys who pay to fuck Lucas could hold him down, Mark thinks. The one guy he got a good look at wasn’t built, but he was bigger than Lucas, for sure. It was one of them who did that to Lucas’s lip, and if someone decided they wanted to hurt him worse than that… it’s always prostitutes who get targeted by serial killers, isn’t it? Why is he shivering all of a sudden?

“C’mon, gun show, take ‘em out,” Sarah Jane says, and makes Mark flex. “Aw yeah, that’s more like it. I should start scheduling you to take deliveries.”

Lucas pokes Mark’s arm. “Jesus, how much time do you spend at the gym?”

“A lot,” says Mark, not bothering to come up with a witty retort. He’s still kind of distracted by the idea of Lucas’s body floating in a lake.

***

Mark starts asking Lucas to cover shifts for him, hoping the extra money will help him out. This works exactly once before Lucas figures out what he’s up to and refuses to go along with it. Mark thinks about calling in sick on one of Lucas’s days off to get them to call him in, but that would only work once too. And knowing Mark’s parents, they’re probably keeping tabs on his hours, and he’ll get a lecture for slacking if he drops below fifteen a week.

Lucas’s lip heals, but then Mark spots a deep bruise on his wrist, and after that there’s something wrong with one of his fingers. He tries not to show any of it, but now that Mark’s looking, he keeps seeing things. Too-careful movements. Long sleeves on hot days. Some of it might be Mark’s imagination running wild, but he’s not fucking imagining that limp.

It’s driving him crazy, not being able to help, but he can’t figure out how to get Lucas to let him.

***

Mark is coming off a shift, hanging back to explain to Lucas why he’s in a bad mood about the latest Seahawks trade, when this guy in an expensive suit starts picking on Lucas for making his ridiculously complicated coffee order wrong. Lucas isn’t actually making it wrong--Mark heard the guy order, and Lucas did exactly what he asked for--but sometimes these customers happen. The guy kind of reminds Mark of his dad, actually.

Lucas gives up trying to explain to the guy that yes, this _is_ low-fat milk, no matter what he thinks the foam looks like, and just remakes the drink. “What I don’t get,” he says to Mark, “is why you’re mad that they traded this guy away when I know I heard you complaining last week about what a waste of space he is. Didn’t you say you actually wanted them to trade him?”

Mark didn’t actually realize Lucas was paying attention during that rant. It makes him feel a little weird, although he’s not sure why. “Right, but I wanted them to get more for him. This deal is bullshit, they got peanuts. Not even peanuts. One measly peanut.”

Lucas holds up the milk jug before he pours, to show the customer that he’s using low-fat. “But if he’s a waste of space, why should your team have been able to get anything good for him?”

“Because nobody _else_ knows how much of a waste of space he is, so we _could_ have gotten--” Mark starts, but he’s interrupted by Mr. That’s Not Low-Fat I Know What Low-Fat Foam Looks Like.

“I said latte, that’s a cappuccino. For fuck’s sake. Maybe if you took off your fake hipster glasses and quit jawing about sports you don’t even understand, you’d be able to do your damn job.”

Lucas makes direct eye contact with the asshole and slowly pours the coffee out into the sink. The guy’s eyes get huge, and his eyebrows kind of bush out, like a pissed-off cat’s fur.

“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” Lucas says coldly.

“What the fuck.” The guy looks around. “Where’s your manager?”

He’s being loud enough that Sarah Jane hears him and comes out of the office. “What’s going on?” she asks.

The guy looks at her like she’s something he sat in unexpectedly on the bus. “I want to talk to a manager,” he says, still addressing Lucas.

“I’m the owner.”

God, Mark loves the expressions on people’s faces when Sarah Jane says that. He tries not to laugh, because that really wouldn’t help the situation any.

“The _owner?_ ” the man snaps. “You’re not even old enough to work here legally!”

Sarah Jane folds her arms. “Lucas, what happened?”

“He’s pissed because I made his coffee the way he asked me to,” says Lucas. “And possibly because I don’t follow football, that part wasn’t totally clear.”

“And because you wear glasses,” Mark puts in. Lucas points at him in agreement.

The guy huffs. “You don’t need those, you’re just trying to look cool.” And then he leans over the counter and actually snatches them off Lucas’s face. Mark lunges forward, but the dicksmack breaks the bridge of them before he gets there.

“Hey!” yells Sarah Jane. “You better pay for those!”

The guy looks down at the glasses, clearly realizing too late that they’re prescription lenses, then throws the broken pieces on the floor and takes off. A woman near the door tries to grab him, but he shakes her away and dashes out the door.

“Shit,” says Sarah Jane. “Did he pay by card?”

Mark shakes his head. “Cash, and he didn’t even put the pennies in the tip jar. Bastard.”

Lucas hasn’t moved. His face looks completely blank. Without his glasses on, Mark is viscerally reminded of how he looked prowling Aurora.

Sarah Jane bends down to pick up the broken glasses and inspects them. “You might be able to glue the frames, but the lenses are gonna need to be replaced,” she says, holding them out to Lucas. He takes them silently and retreats through the swinging doors.

Catarina hurries in, her bag flying behind her. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, disappearing into the back. She emerges a moment later with an apron. “What’s wrong with Lucas?”

“I’ll go talk to him,” says Mark quickly, and goes before Sarah Jane has a chance to object. He’s not on duty, anyway, she can’t yell at him for leaving the register.

Lucas is sitting on the floor by the big refrigerator, cradling his knees to his chest. Mark approaches him cautiously. When he doesn’t speak, Mark sits down next to him. “Hey,” he says softly.

“I had it figured out,” Lucas murmurs. “This month was gonna be tight, but I was gonna make it. Shit, it’s Monday, there’s not gonna be enough business tonight for me to get away with stealing anybody off Blake’s boys.”

It’s probably not a good idea to ask any questions right now. “I could loan you money?” Mark suggests. “Pay me back when you can?”

Lucas shakes his head. “I don’t like being in debt.”

It doesn’t sound like he has a whole lot of choice, but Mark knows better than to say that out loud. “Well, let me know if you change your mind,” he says, and chances a pat on the shoulder. Lucas doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t flinch away. That's something.


End file.
